Dean Alderucci

Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management

Dean Alderucci is an Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he teaches the Innovation Strategy and Business Applications of Natural Language Processing courses, and is faculty advisor to the Innovation Group at Chicago Booth. Dean is an innovation consultant with over fifteen years of experience encompassing two areas - processes for innovating and patent protection for innovations.

Dean was previously Vice President of Cantor Fitzgerald, a global financial services firm, where he founded and was Chief Operating Officer of its Innovation Division. Before that he was Senior Vice President of IP Strategy at Walker Digital, an R & D laboratory and business incubator known for creating and spinning off Priceline.com and over a dozen other technology start-ups.

Dean operates in all phases of innovation, including teaching how to create new products and services, patent strategy, and commercialization of innovations. He teaches design thinking, ownable innovations, and other popular innovation methodologies. He also developed the field of formal processes for generating innovations that both are patentable and have maximum licensing value.

Dean is an inventor on more than 200 granted U.S. patents, and has been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. His innovations span a wide range of fields including financial services, gaming, e-commerce systems, microprocessor design, firearms, machine learning, operating systems, and computer networking.

Dean's research involves two areas. The first focuses on relatively unexplored areas at the intersection of operations and innovation. His principal research interests include formal strategy frameworks for inventing, applying operations research tools to corporate patent processes, the gaps between design thinking and competitive responses, and protection processes designed for extremely high-value inventions. His second research area is machine learning, including natural language processing and document data mining for patents and other legal documents.

Dean is a frequent speaker at educational institutions, corporations, and organizations on business innovation and management of corporate innovation processes. He has been a faculty member of various organizations that provide continuing legal education to attorneys. Dean is a registered patent attorney, is admitted to practice before various state and federal courts in the U.S., and is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales.

Dean holds Master of Science degrees from Columbia University in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Operations Research, and a Master of Laws in Innovation & Information Law from New York University School of Law. He also holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Boston University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.